David Crockett was born on this site on August 17, 1786, the fifth of nine children in a frontier family living amid extreme poverty, danger, and uncertainty in the years just after the United States secured independence from Great Britain in 1783 and fell into a severe post-Revolutionary War economic depression. Archeological evidence shows that Native cultures had inhabited this area for tens of thousands of years; by the eighteenth century the Cherokee were the only permanent Native people here, while the British claimed it as part of North Carolina. In 1784 the region, including the valley of the Nolichuckey River, became part of the short-lived State of Franklin, and by 1796 the area comprising Greene, Carter, Washington, and Sullivan Counties officially entered the new State of Tennessee. The Crockett family had joined the westward migration into the Appalachian region, reaching what later became northeast Tennessee in 1775, but conflict followed as white settlement pressed into the wilderness and fighting with Indian nations, aided by the British, intensified during the American Revolution. In 1777, during the frontier violence known as the terrible sevens, an Indian war party attacked the small station at Rogersville and killed Crockett’s grandparents. His father, John Crockett, survived and later served as one of Isaac Shelby’s rangers, joining the Over-mountain Men in their 1780 victory over Tories and British forces at Kings Mountain after Major Patrick Ferguson threatened fire and sword. In his 1834 Narrative, David Crockett recalled a childhood incident in which his brothers and another boy took his father’s canoe onto the river near a fall, and a nearby farmer ran to rescue them just before the canoe went over; by 1792 the Crockett family had bought land and moved to the headwaters of Lick Creek in present-day Rheatown.